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notes on the death of hal riney

I'm sure what's left of the San Francisco ad community is in a little bit of shock this week after the death of Hal Riney.  For all intents and purposes, Riney and his eponymous firm were advertising in San Francisco in the eighties and nineties -- his campaigns (and his voice) were as beautiful, elegant and indefinite as the fog coming in through the Golden Gate. 

The work that Riney did for Bartles & Jaymes, Crocker Bank and Ronald Reagan is legendary. Go Google a Bartles spot, or watch the "morning in america" ad for Ronald Reagan if you need a refresher. But it was his work with Saturn that helped shape brand marketing.

In 1988, when Riney pitched GM for the Saturn account, they were the the underdog. They had only had one auto account before, were much smaller than the entrenched agencies, and were way the hell out in California. (That actually mattered then, apparently.) So when the story broke that GM awarded Riney the business, the insiders were surprised by GM's choice. One exec at Lintas was shocked that Riney wasn't even sure if he would open a new office to service the account. "He better be prepared to spend a lot of time in Detroit. This will change his agency, its culture and all his attitudes about the agency business."

I don't doubt that the Saturn account had an impact on his agency. But I'd wager that Riney had an even bigger impact on advertising. While his competition was worried about office space, he was focused on the Saturn brand. At the news conference announcing the selection of his firm, Riney was quoted as saying "I don't think we'll ever shoot a picture of a car going down a wet, windy road with pylons. We're going to talk to people in different ways than the standard process agencies use." And when it came time to design the dealerships, Riney connected the essence of the brand to the experience of actually buying the car. (Riney to GM on the design of the new Saturn dealerships:  "How about starting by bringing in some plants, something alive, if not kicking.") That little piece of experience design became a key selling point in their ad campaigns.

Unfortunately I couldn't find any of the earliest spots on YouTube (I'm sure I could look elsewhere, but I'm a lazy blogger).  But here's one from around 1993 about the "Saturn homecoming." It's classic Riney.

Watching this spot now it's clear just how much television advertising has changed in the past 15 years; the Riney "tone" that permeates that spot doesn't feel right anymore. If that ad aired today we'd be waiting for the punchline at the end that gives us that little bit of ironic distance.  And when the punchline didn't come we'd reach for our laptops to find blog posts and Flickr photos from Saturn homecoming attendees to see What Really Happened.

So while it may never have actually been morning in America when Riney sold us Reagan, we bought it. And while Saturn may have been just another division of General Motors, we bought that, too. But somehow, his death this week for me reinforced how far away our advertising and media culture is from that era of silky-voiced earnestness.

just one question

So...this weekend's debates. Did Facebook pay ABC or did ABC pay Facebook? It was probably some kind of barter deal...but who had the upper hand?

both numbing and euphoric

Thank God it's online, because it deserves to be online, if only to make it linkable, spreadable, digestible by the blogosphere. If you haven't yet, go read David Foster Wallace's introductory essay to the 2007 edition of Best American Essays. In it, he compares the task of being "the decider" on the collection of essays to the task of filtering the "Total Noise" of U.S. culture.

It's worth quoting this graf at length, where he's working through a list of the pieces he's chosen...

And yet Beard's and Orozco's pieces are so arresting and alive and good that they end up being salient even if one is working as a guest essay editor and sitting there reading a dozen Xeroxed pieces in a row before them and then another dozen in a row after them -- essays on everything from memory and surfing and Esperanto and childhood and mortality and Wikipedia, on depression and translation and emptiness and James Brown, Mozart, prison, poker, trees, anorgasmia, color, homelessness, stalking, fellatio, ferns, fathers, grandmothers, falconry, grief, film comedy -- a rate of consumption which tends to level everything out into an undifferentiated mass of high-quality description and trenchant reflection that becomes both numbing and euphoric, a kind of Total Noise that's also the sound of our U.S. culture right now, a culture and volume of info and spin and rhetoric and context that I know I'm not alone in finding too much to even absorb, much less to try to make sense of organize into any kind of triage of saliency or value. Such basic absorption, organization and triage used to be what was required of an educated adult, a.k.a. an informed citizen -- at least that's what I got taught. Suffice it here to say that the requirements now seem different.

He goes on at length and with footnotes (it's DFW, after all) about the definition of "Best" and "American" and "Essay," and then comes back to make real the challenges of dealing with Total Noise.

Or let's not even mention the amount of research, background, cross-checking, corroboration, and rhetorical parsing required to understand the cataclysm of Iraq, the collapse of congressional oversight, the ideology of neoconservatism, the legal status of presidential signing statements, the political marriage of evangelical Protestantism and corporatist laissez-faire ... There's no way. You'd simply drown. We all would. It's amazing to me that no one much talks about this -- about the fact that whatever our founders and framers thought of as a literate, informed citizenry can no longer exist, at least not without a whole new modern degree of subcontracting and dependence packed into what we mean by 'informed.'

kids these days

big news
Originally uploaded by msippey

I don't think it was this piece, but some quick hit on Morning Edition covering some aspect of the new Pew research about online identity and self-Googling, where someone quoted finally made the point that one approach for managing your online identity is to actually post more and more content under your own name. Bloggers have known this for years -- you want to own the Google search results for your name -- and it's nice to hear this thinking finally make its way into the mass media.

But really, this is just an excuse to experiment with a new type of news blogging -- taking a quick picture of the story you find while leafing through the morning's paper...instead of going to the trouble finding the story and actually linking to it. Plus, it was a way to sneak Santa Claus on to the blog...so a big "ho ho ho" to all you Christmas celebrators out there.

dear lazyweb

Please produce an RSS feed of just images from PerezHilton.com where he's done his scribbling thing on them. Then, please turn that into a Dashboard Widget or a PerezHiltoniffic so I can keyboard shortcut to get an instant dose of images like this. Thanks in advance!

nytimes on tmz

Following up on the centrality of Paris Hilton, The New York Times today profiles TMZ.

“There are times, like with the Paris Hilton story, where we’ve set the agenda for what local news and national news are covering,” Ms. Estey McLoughlin said. “Paris Hilton leads every newscast.”

Oh, be sure to click through to page 2 of the story where SHOCKING TRUTHS are revealed -- publicists for the stars "leak" tidbits to TMZ!

kedrosky on hilton

Paul Kedrosky has a great post on the centrality of Paris Hilton, inspired by the fact that more of the demonstrating companies at the Supernova Tech Innovators panel mentioned her than things like, say, AJAX.

I have diddly use for Ms Hilton and the 24x7 coverage of her brief jail visit, but there is a deeper import here. A bunch of blogs that I don't read, like TMZ, are newly winning the traffic wars. What such sites generally have in common is that they don't even have passing acquaintance with technology, geek-ish stuff, and early adopters. Instead, they are oriented toward the sort of inane pablum that fills supermarket glossies, 7pm TV shows, and such. They are, in other words, all about celebrities, gossip, and entertainment.

If you haven't already, go read the whole thing.  And if you're not the "reading type," just scan for the fantastically illustrative chart which tells the whole story.

scissors paper rock

I have a friend who can't stand to listen to NPR in the car; she classifies it as "talk radio."  Which means she most likely missed the best interview I'd heard in a while, Steve Inskeep's conversation this morning with Jason Simmons, a professional rock, paper, scissors player.  Every second is gold; highly recommended.

tom and shiny happy tv lady

There's something wonderful about Tom Coates and shiny happy Internet TV lady connecting the way they did.  Ahhh, big companies.

post-roll ads

Fred Wilson's got a great take today on post-roll advertising on YouTube...worth quoting at length:

The second link in the post-roll frame should be a bidded marketplace like the right column on the search engines, but it should be only for videos on YouTube.  Say you are a marketer, like Nike. You make a video, doesn’t matter how long or short it is, about your new Nike sneaker that works with the your toaster so breakfast is ready when your run is over. You post that video to YouTube in your brand channel (which already exists on YouTube) and you buy a bunch of tags (user generated keywords) that you want that ad to be linked to from the back frame. You pay on a CPC basis, only for the clicks that come from that link and lead to plays of your video.  If your video is great and the audience loves it, passes it around, etc, you can probably stop buying traffic to it and rely on the organic linking and viral nature of the service to keep the video playing.

Two additional thoughts on this.  First, YouTube is in a position to do this today because of their scale and reach.  They dominate online video, and the fact that they make it easy for that video to be distributed around the web has dramatically contributed to that dominance.  I know this is stating the obvious, but it's not like every one of the video sharing sites has the reach to pull something like this off.

Second, for brave brands there's no reason why those post-roll ads need to link to their own produced content; how great would it be if Nike decided to link to content that's created by their customers, and somehow worked them into the revenue stream?